To My Wanton Winged Hussar
From Your Gentle Giant
Content Warning: NSFW (Sex, Suicide, Self-Harm)
To my esteemed and dearly beloved Mark:
You are not going to read this. You are not going to think about me for the rest of our lives. I know this because Jonathan told me you got engaged, and I confirmed this with Andrzej. My readers don’t yet know why that is so gut-wrenching, but I will let them know shortly. If you have any decency—which I’m convinced you do, but it has been locked in a drawer—you would immediately own up to exactly what I’m referring to.
This letter is not about begging for understanding that you will never give me. This is about picking up the pieces of myself—more than that, it is about acknowledging that I may never pick up the pieces again. There are some things you cannot heal from. Normies don’t like to hear this, and I suspect Substack subscribers don’t like to either; 99% of the world lives on false hope and cope. You know I’m not into bullshit. That’s one of the things that made us compatible even though I’m squishy and you are a rock.
You played a special role in breaking me this way. You were the last crutch. I did not intend for you to play this role and I’m quite sure you were not planning to either. But it is completely your fault. You said that just using me as a toy wasn’t enough for you.
Why did you lie?
You could have treated me like a regular hookup; someone to use, and then toss out the next day. I would have been fine with it. I know what men are like because I am a man. It doesn’t bother me. I have no need to excuse, justify, or soften the animal that is male sexuality.
No, instead, you went for the jugular in that way only a sly Slav could—direct, disarming, and a little bit brutal. When you told me, “I like your balls, and I like the head attached to them,” you weren’t just being crass. You were telling me you saw me—intelligent, courageous, and sexy as hell. I know this because I could see in your dark brown eyes, a shade only a hair lighter than mine, that this was not a rehearsed line.
Do you see why our initial meeting is such a lynchpin? Because you’ve taken the value of those things away from me, too.
I even asked you later if you had planned to drop me like a garbage bag into the bin. You said yes, initially, but I changed your mind. I let you throw me against the wall, and onto the couch, or into my mattress, and later tangled on the bare carpet. Over and over again. While I gripped and scratched into your upper back and made you bleed with my fingernails. I wanted you to see me, the monster that I am, because I knew you could handle it.
I know so few people who have the verbal adroitness to disarm me effectively, let alone Polacks, and especially gay Polacks. Did I ever tell you that my favorite character from Civ V is Casimir III? Or did I neglect to mention that in all the haste?
It is genuinely impossible for me to forget the feeling that coursed through me when you picked me up that night outside Sports Page. I spent months and months afterward trying to figure out what that sensation was. I know what being turned on is like and this was something else altogether. One day during a road trip, several weeks after we would never speak again, my mind (and my Corolla) were racing at 100mph, and it finally clicked.
You had managed to submit me.
Voluntarily.
Without hardly any effort, you sent a lightning bolt past every single romantic defense structure and hit me right in the deepest center of my heart. Given that I had not even started practicing Jiu-Jitsu at that time, I need you to appreciate how difficult this is to accomplish.
I have an extraordinarily well-developed inner tyrant. She knows exactly how, when, where, and why to be in control. She took form early on because I had no option. If you want to read a severe case of what that looks like, you should read Prachi Gupta’s memoir.
From the age of thirteen onward, every single aspect of life was about shoving some emergency spaghetti code into my operating system so that I could fulfill the incongruous and incoherent goals set by authority figures who had no compunction to spend the time to actually make sense of who I should be.
Contrary to what people think, even in 2024 A.D., it’s still not easy to be gay. It is not easy to be a Tamilian Brahmin raised in Protestant culture. It is not easy to be a guy who has much stronger feeling functions than thinking functions when the world expects you to derive worth from exclusively the latter.
Try being all three.
I learned pretty early on what happens when you don’t meet expectations. My dad, bless his romantic heart (so I guess it’s his fault, too), chose a love marriage. He married not just a beautiful maiden but a brilliant technologist, one who was determined to make waves in the world.
You can imagine how well that went down with my paternal grandmother. For years, she seemed to call my mom everything but her name, though she thought she was clever enough to do it in private. Her favorites were பொறுக்கி (Porukki/Low-Class) and அரக்கி (Arakki/Demonness), but every once in a while she relished to throw in a வேசி (Vēsi/Whore)—just the kind of warm, loving remarks every child should hear while playing with their Legos, right? Do parents really think children don’t pick up on these things? Trust me, when you hear grandma shrieking about ‘the shame’ in the family because your mom has, you know, ambitions, it tends to stick with you.
It wasn’t long before I realized: meeting expectations wasn’t just encouraged; it was the only way to avoid becoming an exile. Not that allying myself with the dominance of the tyrant helped in any way at the end of the day. I’m exactly as exiled as I would have been if I had not put all my faith into her.
You knew this well on your end, too. That you earned your American citizenship, that you worked in Silicon Valley, that you had a loving boyfriend; these were not sufficient to stop you from getting disowned. You’re not even allowed to visit your parents’ house anymore. Does it sting that they did not even tell you this yourself? That this information came through Andrzej? Did the nights I spent with you help you feel better—to come to terms with the cruelty of it all?
You and I both know that this is exactly what makes trads so odious: when they exalt the sanctity of family values, this is what they are exalting. Funny how Andrzej is allowed to cheat on this wife with aplomb, while having a daughter no less, and that doesn’t seem to exclude him from reprimand. But liking another man? Liking me?
If my memory serves me correctly, I rubbed your back in the bathtub for over an hour when you broke down because you recognized how full of shit they were. We have that in common—the impulse to make shitty excuses for the deplorable behavior of the people who are supposed to look out for us.
By the time a couple of months had passed since our first date, the tyrant had become a prison warden, reminding me to be fucking grateful for the crutches she found for me—not that I deserve them, she assures me, or that I know how to maintain them without fucking them up. I had spent my entire 20s painstakingly disarming her, one-by-one taking away the weapons that she used to hold me hostage to her agenda of excellence:
The anorexia.
The compulsive masturbation.
The social isolation.
The episodes of uncontrollable temper.
The nightmares.
The emotional seizures.
She kept turning up the heat. She was losing her battle over me, and it didn’t matter to me, because I had you. We had each other, Mark. It turns out you were the final crutch, though. You did the favor of yanking yourself away. You, and the liberals who I thought were my friends.
If you remember nothing else between us, I know you will remember this forever. You know what you said. The make-or-break moment, when I said that we might have a shot at this for real.
"Yeah, I definitely want to get married, but, I definitely don't want it to be to you."
Is that what they mean when they say break-up sex is world-shattering? For a millisecond I thought you might be joking; your usual devilish sense of humor.
I was wrong.
For another millisecond, I thought you might have wanted to take it back. But you didn’t. You just looked away and crashed on your pillow. I showed myself out, half-dressed.
Where did you learn such cruelty, Mark? Your parents should be prouder of you than they are.
Do you know that I cannot ejaculate anymore without immediately being overcome by a tsunami of worthlessness? Forget about my never falling in love again at the moment. I might never be able to have good sex again. I’ve tried a handful of times. I cannot get past kissing or first base. You have lodged yourself in my nervous system. I chose to let you do that.
Every time the heat turns up past a certain threshold, the coals of shame start to burn me up from the inside.
You will be abandoned because that is what you deserve
I drank nearly an entire bottle of vodka that night, by myself. Anyone who witnessed me genuinely would have thought I was committed to ending it.
Do you recall those conversations we had about the Mahabharata? I doubt it, but humor me. Yudhishthira—he’s the perfect example of how acting with dharma is basically a sick joke. He had all the virtues, studied all the shastras, followed all the rules, and where did it get him? Watching his family get decimated and his kingdom crumble, so he could stand on the ashes of everything he lost, muttering to himself, “At least I did the right thing.”
The world loves reminding us that being a decent (notice, I didn’t say good) person is a great way to end up with a front-row seat to your own destruction. And, the part no one ever warned me about is that I would sign up for it willingly.
I’m not bringing this up because I’m trying to yell at the universe about unfairness.
I’m bringing this up with you, Mark, because of what you said at the beginning: about the importance of my own courage and intelligence. My style, too. I drove you crazy wearing my hot-pink sleeveless that one afternoon at Pacifica Beach. You couldn’t decide whether to keep it on me or rip it off of me. I was given a salmon-colored kurta as a gift a couple weeks ago. If it fit him, I would give it to your groom-to-be to wear. I know how much that would please you.
But now you’re off living your life, and I’m left here holding the philosophical bag, wondering how many more rounds of reaching the edges of death I need to go through before the universe decides, “Okay, maybe that’s enough.” (Spoiler alert: it never decides that.) There is no Arjuna or Krishna to save me from my mess. They passed away a long time ago, and I’m inclined to join them.
My readers want a lesson. This is why I hate audiences. They want a “moral to the story”. Something to grasp onto that makes the reality of life seem less bleak, more manageable. They want me to wrap this up with a neat little bow, some “takeaway” that makes them feel better about the debris.
You’d be rolling your eyes and smirking handsomely, accusing me of using this letter as some underhanded plea for closure. I’m still the melancholic, and you’re still the optimist, believing in the comforting pretensions of Disney princes and their castles. But here’s the truth: closure is a lie. Chapter endings are a fabrication, a neat trick from the literary Illuminati to make people believe in the fantasy of resolution.
No, I’m telling you, this isn’t about closure. It’s about the cold realization that my life is a patchwork of everyone else’s demands and dreams—never mine. It’s about staring down the barrel of the rest of my life, knowing that I have no substance; nothing in my experience produced from a genuine sense of self-possession and self-sovereignty.
Everything I thought was mine—my achievements, my talents, my skills, my values, my relationships—are crutches I grabbed hold of just to survive. Built on a foundation of falsehoods, as a response to trying to rise to meet standards that I was told were good for me, but that I was never, ever going to be accepted for actually meeting. I was never offered a way to try to deploy them according to my terms.
The funniest crutch is my supposed “intellect.” It’s perverted when you think about it—the greatest con I ever pulled on myself. I clung to it like a lifeboat, only to find out it’s been made of duct tape and delusion. Spent my entire life being the smart one, believing it could buoy me above everything else. I mean, who needs self-esteem when you’ve got a high SAT score, right? Turns out, that was just a clever ploy to avoid the uncomfortable work of figuring out who I am.
I’m left standing in the wreckage of my own defenses, inside a ditch where a life should have been.
Your Cherished “Gentle Giant”, Rajeev
